SPACE FACTS 2: The planets in our solar system
The centre of our solar system is the sun. All of the planets in our solar system orbit the sun. It takes the Earth 1 year to orbit the sun.
The closest planet to the sun is Mercury. The Earth is the third planet closest to the sun. This picture shows the relative sizes of the planets (but not their relative distance from the sun). See how tiny the Earth is in comparison to the giants like Jupiter and Saturn, and how large the sun is.
Can you write aour own Mnemonic to remember the order of the planets?
My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Names
Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune
As the planets orbit around the sun, the distance from Earth to the other planets varies depending on our positions around the sun.
Mars, for example is 54.6 million km (33.9 million miles) away from Earth at its closest and 401 million km (250 million miles) away at its furthest (when it's the other side of the sun to us). Light takes between 182 seconds (3.03 minutes) and 1,342 seconds (22.4 minutes) to travel from Mars to Earth so we see it 3 - 22 minutes in its past. For example, if we saw it explode then it would have happened 3 -22 minutes before we saw it. It takes about 7 months to travel to Mars in a spacecraft (travelling about 300 million miles). At its closest, Mars is the nearest planet to Earth.
Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. At its closest, it is 588 million km (365 million miles) from Earth and light takes 33 minutes to reach Earth. At its furthest, Jupiter is 968 million km (601 million miles) from Earth and light takes 54 minutes to reach us. It takes between 17.9 months (546 days) and 6.1 years (2,242 days) to travel to Jupiter in a spacecraft.
Pluto is the furthest planet in our solar system. At its closest, Pluto is 4,280 million (or 4.28 billion) km (2,660 million (or 2.66 billion) miles) from Earth and it takes on average 5 and a half hours for light to travel this distance. It took 9.5 years for the New Horizon space probe, travelling at 43,000 km/hr (27,000 mph), to travel from Earth to Pluto, speeding past it in 2015.